The “Deadlift of Mental Strength” Is This Five-Minute Journaling Routine

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — I deadlifted yesterday. Squatted, too, both front and back. This morning, I bench-pressed and supersetted that with pull-ups.

If you were to do only those four exercises — deadlift, squat, bench press or pushups, and pullups — for the rest of your life, you’d be a remarkably fit individual. They’re compound exercises, requiring muscles both big and small, and when you combine all four, you hit virtually every muscle in your body in a huge way.

But what, I wondered on this week’s podcast, with Dr. Nate Zinsser, author of the seminal book, The Confident Mind — the most important book I’ve read when it comes to sports and my own confidence in that arena — is considered the deadlift or bench press or back squat of mental strength?

How can we hit our mindfulness muscle in the same compound way we can so easily hit our bodies in the weight room?

“The equivalent of the deadlift when it comes to confidence development is the daily reflection when it comes to your workout or practice,” he said. “This could be a five-minute exercise. I don’t want it to take a whole lot of time, but it’s really important. Reflect upon your workout or practice session or training session and ask yourself three questions.

“One: where in this episode did I invest some quality effort? Was there a station I grunted through? Was there an exercise I really wasn’t looking forward to but I did it? Where did I invest quality effort? Here, maybe here, maybe here. There’s three little nuggets, if you will.

“The second question is: What did I succeed at? Or what did I get right? Looking for little tiny successes. They’re not going to be big, but you gotta look for them anyway.

“The third question is: What did I get better at? Based on my experience today, yesterday, and the day before, what is something I’m getting better at?

“The answers to those three questions: Where am I showing effort, what am I getting right, what am I getting better at, those are deposits into a psychological bank account. If you have enough money in that bank account, you have a lot more reasons to be confident in yourself when you step in to compete.

“Examine your practice, examine your work, and extract from it episodes of effort, episodes of small success, indicators of progress.”

I can vouch for its effectiveness. When I first read The Confident Mind in 2022 and began jotting down my daily E.S.P., there is both a seen and unseen — but certainly felt — explosion of my confidence. My results on the court began to tick up, and my confidence rose with it. But what was so vital was that my confidence wasn’t tied to my results anymore the way they once were in, say, 2018. That was the year I made my first AVP main draw, in Austin, Texas — and then, two weeks later, flopped in the first round of the qualifier in New York… and again in the second round of Seattle a few weeks after that. Imposter syndrome settled in like a wet blanket: Was I really a main draw player? Or did I have a fluky performance in one random tournament?

In 2022, there was no longer a question mark.

I took four top-fives on the AVP with JM Plummer, including the season-ending event in Tavares, Florida, won a silver medal in Cuba with Tim Brewster, marking the first international medal of his now-blooming career, and parlayed that success for the remainder of my playing career.

“It can really shift your whole sense of self, and I guess that’s the point,” Zinsser said of the E.S.P. routine.

It did for me. But it begs the question: Why? What is it about a five-minute journaling routine that can so radically change our minds in a way that five minutes in a gym never could for our bodies?

“There is a higher degree of stickiness when you pick up a pen and scribble on paper,” Zinsser said. “There’s neurobiological demand in order to write with a paper and pen…as opposed to tapping. It’s more neurobiologically demanding and therefore has a little more effect for you.”

And every time you right, you make a deposit into the metaphorical psychological bank account, slowly building your confidence until, one day, you’ll realize, you have, one could say, a truly Confident Mind.